A Context for Calculus

Calculus gives us a language to describe how quantities are related to one another, and it gives us a set of computational and visual tools for exploring those relationships. Usually, we want to understand how quantities are related in the context of a particular problem--it might be in chemistry, or public policy, or mathematics itself. In this chapter we take a single context--an infectious disease spreading through a population--to see how calculus emerges and how it is used.

• The Spread of Disease
  • Making a Model
  • A Simple Model for Predicting Change
  • The Rate of Recovery
  • The Rate of Transmission
  • Completing the Model
  • Analyzing the Model
  • Exercises
    • Reading a Graph
    • A Simple Model
    • Mark Twain's Mississippi
    • The Measles Epidemic
    • Other Diseases
    • What Goes Around Comes Around